A transparent conductive film having a base made of a transparent plastic film and a transparent thin film of a small resistance stacked on the base is being used widely for applications in the electric and electronic fields taking advantage of the conductivity of the transparent conductive film such as flat-panel displays including liquid crystal displays and electroluminescent (sometimes abbreviated as EL) displays, and transparent electrodes for resistive touch panels.
In recent years, there have been increasing cases where capacitive touch panels are mounted on mobile devices such as mobile phones and potable audio terminals. These capacitive touch panels use a transparent conductive film with a patterned transparent conductive layer provided on a surface of a base. However, if the conventional transparent conductive film is used, the patterning is exaggerated since optical characteristics change widely between part with the transparent conductive layer and part from which the transparent conductive layer has been removed. As a result, a problem of visibility reduction occurs if such a transparent conductive film is arranged on the front side of a display device such as a liquid crystal display.
To cope with this, the following technique has been suggested (Patent Literatures 1 and 2, for example). In this technique, a stacked film with a stack of dielectric layers having different indexes of refraction is provided between a transparent conductive thin film layer and a base film, and the visibility of a transparent conductive film is improved by taking advantage of optical interference between these stacked films.